ASA Recognizes Six at Annual Meeting

Four educators and two journalists received honors from the Acoustical Society of America during ASA’s 149th annual meeting, held in October in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The following awards were presented at the gathering:

Katherine Safford Harris, Distinguished Professor Emerita of speech and hearing sciences at the graduate school of the City University of New York, received the Rossing Prize in Acoustics Education. The prize, in its second year, carries a $3000 purse and is given to recognize significant contributions to acoustics education through teaching, creation of educational materials, textbook writing, and other activities.

Harris was also awarded the Silver Medal in Speech Communication “for research and leadership in speech production.”

The Silver Medal in Animal Bio-acoustics was presented to James M. Simmons, professor of neuroscience at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He was recognized “for contributions to understanding bat echolocation.”

Henrik Schmidt, professor of mechanical and ocean engineering at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, received the Pioneers of Underwater Acoustics Medal “for pioneering contributions in numerical modeling and at-sea experiments in underwater acoustics.”

The Trent-Crede Medal was given to Jerry H. Ginsberg, George W. Woodruff Chair and Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s school of mechanical engineering in Atlanta. He was honored “for contributions to the theory of vibrations of complex systems.”

Declan Butler, a senior reporter with Nature, received the Science Writing Award in Acoustics for Journalists for his piece “Sound and Vision,” published in Nature on 5 February 2004.

Kate Ramsayer, who reports on business and the environment at the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, also received the Science Writing Award in Acoustics for Journalists. She was honored for her story “Infrasonic Symphony,” which was published in Science News on 10 January 2004.